These things of course took time, and had to be fought for with toil and sweat of brain and heart, and with the life-blood poured out. All that, Arthur[15] had laid his account to give, and took as a matter of course; neither pitying himself, nor looking on himself as a martyr, when he felt the wear and tear making him feel old before his time, and the stifling air of fever-dens telling on his health. His wife seconded him in everything. She had been rather fond of society, and much admired and run after before her marriage; and the London world to which she had belonged pitied poor Fanny Evelyn when she married the young clergyman, and went to settle in that smoky hole, Turley, a very nest of Chartism[16] and Atheism, in a part of the country which all the decent families had had to leave for years. However, somehow or other she didn't seem to care. If her husband's living[17] had been amongst green fields and near pleasant neighbors, she would have liked it better,--that she never pretended to deny. But there they were; the air wasn't bad, after all; the people were very good sort of people,--civil to you if you were civil to them, after the first brush; and they didn't expect to work miracles, and convert them all off-hand into model Christians. So he and she went quietly among the folk, talking to and treating them just as they would have done people of their own rank. They didn't feel that they were doing anything out of the common way, and so were perfectly natural and had none of that condescension or consciousness of manner which so out-rages the independent poor. And thus they gradually won respect and confidence; and after sixteen years he was looked up to by the whole neighborhood as _the_ just man, _the_ man to whom masters and men could go in their strikes, and in all their quarrels and difficulties, and by whom the right and true word would be said without fear or favor. And the women had come round to take her advice, and go to her as a friend in all their troubles, while all the children worshipped the ground she trod on. [15] #Arthur#: here, young Arthur's father. [16] #Chartism#: the principles of a political party which demanded universal suffrage and other radical reforms. The chartists were regarded much as the anarchists are now. [17] #Living#: parish. They had three children, two daughters and a son, little Arthur, who came between his sisters. He had been a very delicate boy from his childhood; they thought he had a tendency to consumption, and so he had been kept at home and taught by his father, who had made a companion of him, and from whom he had gained good scholarship, and a knowledge of, and an interest in, many subjects which boys in general never come across till they are many years older.